GE Hiring Thousands of Engineers to Build Industrial Web

Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric Co. (GE), speaks during a keynote address at the Minds + Machines 2012: Unleashing the Industrial Internet conference in San Francisco. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

June 17 (Bloomberg) -- General Electric Co. is hiring
thousands of engineers near San Francisco in a push to connect
everything from jet engines to medical-imaging machines to the
Web and help customers run equipment more efficiently.

“We’ve opened a software center in the East Bay, hiring
thousands of software engineers to basically bring all the great
innovation you’ve seen in Silicon Valley now to industry,” Beth
Comstock, chief marketing officer at GE, said at the Bloomberg
Next Big Thing Summit in Half Moon Bay, California.

Comstock said GE is developing an “industrial Internet,”
building networks that harvest data from commercial machines and
offering services to help customers analyze the resulting reams
of information. The company said last year that it was investing
$1 billion in a facility in San Ramon and hiring engineers from
Oracle Corp., SAP AG and Symantec Corp. as well as Stanford
University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Chief Executive Officer Jeff Immelt has stressed the
savings potential from using data to tweak machines, saying that
even a 1 percent improvement in the operations of commercial
aircraft would translate into $2 billion less per year in fuel
costs for GE’s customers in the airline industry.

As Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE adds sensors to jet
engines, the next step is to help customers analyze all the
resulting data, Comstock said.

“We probably haven’t seen anything yet when it comes to
data when machines start talking to machines and machines start
talking to people,” Comstock said. “We have to make sense of
it.”